Tag Archives: Companies

Better-than-expected US jobs data helped propel Wall Street as did corporate earnings that exceeded expectations such as from United Parcel Service. “Companies have gotten very good at controlling expectations. This has been a pattern of crunching down of estimates prior to earnings being released, and when earnings come out, they beat the number,” Stephen Massocca, managing director at Wedbush Equity …

Warehouse Group, New Zealand’s biggest listed retailer, will reap a pretax gain of between $14 million and $15 million from the sale of Silverdale Centre in Auckland after developing the shopping complex on land it had owned for almost two decades. Listed property investors DNZ Property Fund agreed to buy the fully-leased property for $78 million in a move that …

APN News & Media, the publisher of the New Zealand Herald newspaper has shaken up its management structure, leaving out head of digital Matt Crockett, who was reportedly in the running for the top job. The Sydney-based media group has made chief development officer Crockett, a former head of Telecom New Zealand’s wholesale unit, redundant and replaced regional media division …

Infratil, the Wellington-based investment group managed by Morrison & Co, says its sale of up to $100 million of June 2022 bonds won’t open as planned today because it needs to amend the prospectus for the Labour Party-Greens power plan. “Although the prospectus discloses changes in the regulatory environment as one of the principal risks of an investment in infrastructure …

Wall Street rallied amid optimism about the outlook for companies including Netflix as they beat earnings expectations. Shares of Netflix soared, last up 23.7 percent, after the company yesterday said it had added 2 million new US customers last quarter. Of the 131 Standard & Poor’s 500 Index companies that have reported their quarterly results so far, 73 percent have …

New Zealand’s largest insurance group, IAG, has slightly improved its underlying profit margins on insurance products while passing on a doubling in the cost global reinsurance because of the Canterbury earthquakes. In a presentation for investors in Sydney, IAG’s New Zealand chief Jacki Johnson said reinsurance costs had risen to 15 percent of gross written premiums (GWP) in the first …

Allied Farmers, which kept itself alive last month through a fire sale of toxic loans, has sold its Taranaki real estate unit for $472,500, more than a quarter of the group’s value by market capitalisation. The Hawera-based firm sold its Allied Farmers First National business to the unit’s manager’s Shawn Gibbon and Owen Mills as part of its asset sale …

Snakk Media, the latest brainchild of Hyperfactory co-founder Derek Handley, wants to raise up to $2 million through a share purchase plan near the bottom of an independent adviser report’s valuation range. The Auckland-based company will sell shares at 12 cents apiece, a 20 percent discount to the average trading price over the past 30 days, and near the lower …

Meridian Energy and the owners of its largest customer, the Tiwai Point aluminium smelter, are continuing to talk after an intense three days’ face to face negotiation last week, with parties in both Wellington and Sydney crunching numbers on possible new deals. Neither side will comment on the record, but BusinessDesk understands efforts to find common ground on a new …

Contact Energy shares dropped almost 6 percent in early NZX trading, with the company saying it was “hard to see” how it would have justified investing $2.5 billion in new power plants if the Labour-Greens electricity policy had been in place. In a statement not issued to the NZX but received by BusinessDesk, Contact chief executive Dennis Barnes says “under …